Resources for new teachers, change provocateurs

June 22, 2007

New teachers, especially teachers from alternative certification programs, have all sorts of stories about people who observe and supervise their training and work.

There is the guy whose district bought laptops for every high school student and insisted teachers use the computers daily, but whose principal refused to look at the on-line courses he had developed to meet the district’s guidelines (and whom the principal subsequently rated down for not having the lesson plans the principal refused to look at).  There is the drama coach whose supervisor complained the students shouldn’t have been out of school for the state competition, which they won.  There is the mathematician from the telecommunications industry whose supervisor didn’t know geometry, or algebra, or calculus, and insisted the teacher should be offering multiplication table timed quizzes to advanced math classes.  The guy whose principal thought history documentaries selected from the school’s libraries were just Hollywood movies, and therefore inappropriate for history classes.

More than enough horror stories to go around.

One teacher tells a few horror stories from his student teaching days, but tells us he went on to get his school’s distinguished alumnus award.  And so, he shares some of his best material, here:  Horace Mann Educated Financial Solutions, “Reach Every Child.”

Go make change.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Car Family, which is really the same guy.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, Lesson plans, No Child Left Behind Act, Pedagogy, Public education, School discipline, TAKS, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

For-profit Educate, Inc., goes private (Sylvan Learning, Hooked-on-Phonics)

June 15, 2007

Educate, Inc., the parent company of Sylvan Learning Centers, traded for the last time on the NASDAQ exchange yesterday.

No, the company didn’t go out of business. It was taken private by its management, after being a public company for three years. From the Baltimore Sun morning e-mail:

Educate becomes a private company

Educate Inc. has completed its transition into a private company, ending its three-year run on public markets.

Best known for its Sylvan tutoring centers, the Baltimore company, which was purchased in a management-led buyout, traded for the last time on the Nasdaq yesterday.

The investor group that purchased the company is led by chief executive officer R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric, other executives and affiliates of Sterling Capital Partners and Citigroup Private Equity. They paid $8 a share for the company in the deal valued at $535 million.

The company announced this week that more than 75 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which came as the firm has struggled with poor product sales.

Internal reorganization was swift.  The company’s website carried this note this morning:

On June 13, 2007, through a merger transaction, Edge Acquisition, LLC became the owner of Educate, Inc. In a related series of simultaneous transactions, the companies which were part of Educate, Inc. have been split into the following independent companies:

  • Educate Services, which includes Sylvan Learning, Catapult Learning, and Schulerhilfe;
  • Hooked on Phonics, Inc., which includes Hooked on Phonics, Reading Rainbow, and GPN;
  • Educate Online, Inc., which includes Catapult Online and eSylvan;
  • Progressus, Inc.; and
  • Educate Corporate Centers Holdings, Inc., which is a franchisee of various Sylvan Learning and owner of Sylvan Learning Centers.

The companies are now operating independently to better serve students, families and schools across the country. To learn more about the merger and related transactions, click here.

Making a profit delivering education is rare.  Milton Friedman notwithstanding, free market rules do not apply to educational enterprises in the same way they do to other services.  This is one more example, or set of examples, that should give pause to any rational person considering making public schools “compete” for money to improve education for any child, especially any group of children.  Sylvan Learning Centers are considered to be the top of the heap in their niche; Hooked-on-Phonics is a cliché success story.  And they “struggle with poor product sales.”

I hope the company finds the education answers, the magic bullets, and can retail them at affordable prices.

The answer, by the way, probably is not 42.

1 Comment | Brain learning, Business, Business Ethics, Education, Education quality, Education spending, Education success, Free market economics, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Treat teachers like bankers?

June 7, 2007

A reader named Sam left this comment, in response to my post on teachers being overworked and underpaid, and I elevate it because it demonstrates, once again, how teachers get dumped on in ways that other professions don’t; Sam makes a good point:

It would be interesting to take into effect that teaching is one of the few jobs where people expend large quantities of their own money to do their job. I was a principal in a large urban district before I left education for a private sector consulting job. Part of the reason I left was the paper rationing that occurred during my last two years on the job. Our school district limited our teachers to three sheets of paper per student per week in an attempt to cut costs. Even the best, most engaging hands-on learning takes more than three sheets per week. Add in the lunch menus, report cards, and parent letters that need to go home and it would guarantee that our paper supply usually ran dry by March 1 or so and my teachers ending up buying their own paper.

Could you imagine the uproar that would occur in the mortgage department of a bank if suddenly employees were required to buy their own copy paper? Why is that acceptable for our teachers?

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service even has a specific standard deduction for teachers to use to cover the materials they take to the classroom, that would be supplied by other employers, that should be supplied by the schools. Isn’t it odd that we make provisions in the tax code to try to offset this error, rather than try to fix it?

12 Comments | Classroom size, Economics, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

What’s the difference between school and prison?

June 5, 2007

Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer, in the Star-Courier, Highlands-Crosby, Texas, March 11, 2004

Give up?

Yeah, often the students give up, too. If you don’t know the answer, your school may resemble a prison.

Gary Stager’s post with jarring comparisons is here, at District Administration’s Pulse! blog. [District Administration purges its archives about every three years, it turns out; here is a copy of Mr. Stager’s column courtesy the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive.]

When the elder Fillmore’s Bathtub son attended intermediate school, he complained of the discipline. So did a lot of other good kids. We got a call from a parent asking if we’d join in a meeting with the new principal, and hoping to learn things were really hunky dory and offer assurances to our son, we went.

Read the rest of this entry »

17 Comments | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, Ethics, Pedagogy, Public education, School discipline, TAKS, Teaching, TEKS, Testing, Texas | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

How it’s done right

June 1, 2007

If I need a lift, I go here. It’s how school should be — probably all the way through.

I don’t know the details of how or why this class is set up the way it is, but day after day they do things that other people use as textbook examples of what a good classroom ought to be doing, sometimes. And they do it day, after day, after day.

Carnival of Education, are you paying attention?

Wow.

I wager right now that these kids will be the top performers on the standardized tests for at least the next five years, in their classrooms and schools. The Living Classroom weblog is a valuable chronicle for how to provide quality education.

Somebody should step up with the money to track how these kids do, especially against their contemporaries. Alas, this is exactly the sort of information that will be lost, due to “lack of funding.” Fortunately, one of the women involved in the classroom made the chronicles, and shared them.

Side note: Looking at the photos, ask yourself, “Does our town offer these types of recreational facilities for use?” Washington has traditionally led the nation in setting aside land for public recreational use — this class has taken full advantage of being in a town that had the foresight to put up public art and public beaches, and other public parks and places. There is a lesson here for city planners, and for mayors and city councils who wonder how they might support their schools, run by other governmental entities.

Dandelion, class activitiy for The Living Classroom

2 Comments | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Brain development, Brain learning, Classroom size, Classroom technology, Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education success, Lesson plans, Music, Pedagogy, School discipline, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Looking up to Finland

May 30, 2007

Commenter Bernarda sent a link to a Washington Post story by Robert Kaiser about Finland, a nation who redesigned its education system with rather dramatic, beneficial results. Among other things, the Finns treat teachers as valuable members of society, with high pay, great support, and heavy training.

Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn’t controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?

Why not? Why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns? Their system boosts their economy and leads to great social progress — which part of that do we not want?

5 Comments | Classroom size, Creativity, Economics, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Politics, Public education, School vouchers, Socialism, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

121st Carnival of Education — School’s out, part I

May 30, 2007

The Education Wonks hosts (host?) the 121sth Carnival of Education — including a nice referral to my post on the voucher wars in Utah.

Franklin HS in Seattle, WA -- Natl Reg of Hist Places

School’s out in much of the nation, and won’t last much longer in the rest (except for full-year schools). It’s a good time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what to change for next year. I was especially intrigued to learn that Mr. Teacher of Learn Me Good teaches in Dallas — close by, somewhere. One wonders how an alternative certification sneaked through the human resources shredder of the Dallas ISD to get a job, and one hopes it may show a trend; and then one wonders why DISD doesn’t pay more attention to the obvious success of the guy and go back to that alternative certification well. (HR departments in Texas school districts have reputations that they really don’t like alternative certification, even when the teachers work out well; one more indication that we don’t know what the heck we’re doing in education. My experience suggests the reputation is well-earned.) [See comment on alternative certification by Mr. Teacher, below.]

There is much, much more in the carnival. The Carnival of Education is an outstanding example of what blog carnivals can be — useful packages of information, summaries of the field they cover. Spread the word.

3 Comments | Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, School discipline, School vouchers, Teaching, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

West High best in Utah

May 28, 2007

West High School, Salt Lake City, Utah

Main entrance to West High School, Salt Lake City, Utah. Wikipedia image

I coulda told you that. It’s my mother’s high school. (Class of ’32)

(My old school, Pleasant Grove High, didn’t make the list.)

3 Comments | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Evangelism vs. scholarship: Bible study in public schools

September 15, 2006

Last year the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) published a revealing study showing that most curricula for Bible study in public schools promote Christian faith more than they study the Bible. The study was done by a witty and amusing professor of religion from Southern Methodist University, Dr. Mark Chancey.

This week they followed up that study with a detailed look at Bible studies courses in Texas public schools, as they are actually presented to students. It’s not pretty.

In their press release, TFN said:

Clergy, Parents Voice Concerns About Public School Bible Classes

New Report Reveals Poor Quality, Bias, Religious Agendas in Texas Courses

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 13, 2006

AUSTIN – Clergy and parents are voicing serious concerns that Bible classes in Texas public schools are of poor quality and promote religious views that discriminate against children from a variety of faith backgrounds.

“The study of the Bible deserves the same respect as the study of Huck Finn, Shakespeare and the Constitution,” said the Rev. Dr. Roger Paynter, pastor of First Baptist Church of Austin. “But in some public schools, Bible courses are being used to promote an agenda rather than to enrich the education of our schoolchildren.”

Dr. Chancey is a solid scholar of the Bible. His criticisms are detailed and often understated, in a business where criticism is generally more hyperbole than substance. Especially if you live in Texas, you should read the report.

In the original study, Chancey noted that some nationally-promoted curricula for Bible studies had plagiarized some of their most important materials, in one case including the entire section on honesty as defined by the Ten Commandments. Dr. Chancey does not write drily — he really does a great job turning words. Both studies are well worth the reading.

First Amendment charlatans are fond of quoting the Supreme Court’s decisions in school-and-religion cases since World War II, in which the Court urges critical studies of scripture, saying such studies are legal and good. Then the charlatans go on to advocate Bible studies that are devotional, confusing a Sunday school class-style of scripture study with the critical literature study the Court actually urged. These reports leave little room for squirming by those advocates.

Last time around, TFN held a meeting here in Dallas featuring Dr. Chancey talking about the report and the reaction to it from the religious right (they were stunned into saying many really stupid things). It was a fun night, and I hope TFN will do it again.

Other coverage of the report:

If you see a particularly good story on the study, will you please send me a link?

Patriots and Christians don’t let children take crappy Bible studies courses:

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81 Comments | Creationism, Curricula, Education, Education quality, First Amendment, Plagiarism, Public education, Religious Freedom, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Textbook Selection | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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